A pin-and-socket coupler is made up of a first connector, e.g., a movable wiring-harness plug, and a second connector, e.g., a plug receiver on a stationary control unit in a motor vehicle.
The two connectors are able to be reversibly coupled to one another, the closing and opening forces being applied by an auxiliary device because of the multitude of contact points. The auxiliary device has a swivelling locking lever as the manipulating part which is preferably supported on the first connector.
A pin-and-socket coupler designed in such a manner is described, for example, by the KET Product Guide, October 1994, page 59, under the designations MG640732 and MG650740 of the Korea Electric Terminal Co., Ltd.
In this pin-and-socket coupler, the block-shaped first connector features the locking lever. The housing of the first connector, which is grasped by hand for feeding the wiring-harness plug through the receiver and is designated as a gripping shell, is designed in one piece, and is open at a lower side for accessibility of its contact elements arranged in rows in a contact carrier.
At one end wall, the gripping shell has a stub (connecting piece) for introducing a wiring harness, and at the side walls adjacent to this end wall, has bearings for the U-shaped locking lever which, when swivelling, slides, with two limbs that are parallel to one another and connected by a crosspiece, along the side walls.
When using this pin-and-socket coupler under restricted spatial conditions, e.g., in a motor vehicle, it can occur that the wiring harness is admitted from a side facing away from the connecting piece, so that the necessary rerouting of the wiring harness may impede the handling of the locking lever which, in the limit positions of its operation, with the crosspiece as the end stop, lies in an open position against the wiring harness, and in a closed position against a top surface of the gripping shell.
To safeguard the closed position of the locking lever, each of the limbs is reversibly locked in place behind allocated catching elements on the side walls of the gripping shell.
It is known as such in the case of a wiring-harness plug, to vary the inlet for the wiring harness in such a way that the wiring harness can be admitted from different directions.
If, to that end, the gripping shell has a two-part design, having a base on which the locking lever is supported, and having a cover which is able to be placed interchangeably (from different directions) on the base and on which the stub is integrally molded, then it can occur that, due to an asymmetrical formation of the cover as a result of the stub attached on one side, the top surface is only available in one case as an end stop for the crosspiece to delimit the closed position of the locking lever, and given a cover which is mounted interchangeably, this end stop is missing.
On the other hand, no end stops can be mounted as substitute on the side walls of the base following the catching elements. This can be traced back to the fact that, given a two-piece gripping shell, for reasons from a standpoint of production engineering, the contact elements are inserted, with the cover removed, directly from the base top-side, upon which the cover is also placed.
However, to that end, it is necessary to swivel the locking lever into a so-called assembling position which lies outside of the swivelling area for locking or releasing the two connectors, and which allows unimpeded access to the top side of the base.
It is undesirable that swivelling the locking lever into the assembling position, which corresponds to the state at time of supply at the outfitter, would not be possible with fixed end stops on the base of the gripping shell.